What can I do with my account on icculus.org?

Here's a basic (and ever-growing) list of things you can do on icculus.org. Consider this to be a "terms of use" policy, I guess. If you don't have an account, but want one, just email Ryan and tell him why you should have one, and he'll set you right up.

However, these are not good reasons:

• You want somewhere to use IRC from.
• You want to circumvent your school or company's firewall.
• You want external file storage.
• You want a throwaway email account for spam.
• You want to hax0r systems.
• You want to run BitTorrent/LimeWire/Gnutella/Kazaa/the P2P software of the week.
• You want a personal homepage (and nothing else).
• You want to host warez.
• You want to host pr0n.
• You want to run spam-sending programs.
• You want to run bots and web crawlers and such.

I hesistated to explicitly list these things for a long time, because I don't want people with good ideas to be intimidated that they won't "pass the bar" and thus never ask for an account, but I get floods of requests for access for just those above reasons. I want to foster creation, not pay the bandwidth bill for someone else's abuse. Those that have accounts do have personal webpages and run IRC clients and store personal files...but they also contribute to the world around them in various ways.

Basically, use some common sense when deciding if you should ask for an account. Several i.o services are available for free from less elitist sites, like Hotmail and SourceForge.

Things you can do on i.o:

• Shell account. It's a full Unix shell account, complete with your own private home directory, C/C++ compiler, and the usual programs. We ask that you don't abuse this privilege by sucking down bandwidth, filling the hard drive, running SETI@home, or using your account to crack into other systems. There aren't any resource quotas on icculus.org right now, and I'd like to keep it that way. Connections to your shell account are done via ssh for security purposes; there is no telnet support available. Linux and Mac OS X users generally have a ssh client installed by default and available from a terminal. I recommend win32 users use PuTTY for ssh access.
  
  
• Two-factor auth. Shell accounts now optionally offer two-factor authentication via Google Authenticator. Just run "google-authenticator" from your shell account, say "yes" when it asks about time-based auth, and point your phone at the QR code it writes to the terminal. Optionally write down your recovery codes somewhere. After that, logging in with a private key will work as normal, but if you log in with a valid password, you'll also be required to provide the magic number from your phone's Google Authenticator app.
  
  
• File transfer. There is also no FTP daemon running. For personal files, use Secure Copy (scp). If there's something you need to make publically downloadable, put it in your webspace (see below). Linux and Mac OS X users get scp packaged with their ssh client, and Mac users might find Fugu to be a decent GUI version. For Windows users, WinSCP is an excellent option, and PuTTY has a command line tool.
  
  
• Finger. There is a (non-crackable :) ) finger daemon running at icculus.org. It looks for the file /fingerspace/username as the contents of your "planfile". By default, we symlink $HOME/.plan to this for convenience. The daemon will not reveal too much information on its own, such as when you last checked your email, or a list of users on the system, nor will it forward finger requests to other sites. If you absolutely don't want ANY information revealed via finger, just leave the planfile empty, and the finger daemon will respond exactly as it does when it can't locate a user in the first place. There is also a web interface to our finger daemon. For an example: http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus . IcculusFinger, which handles finger requests, is a custom piece of software that web-enables finger access. Part of that system is a simple (and optional) markup language, that allows you to do some basic text formatting (bold, center, images, etc). Over the web, these tags become HTML. On regular finger requests, IcculusFinger formats these tags for a plain text output to the best of its ability. See The IcculusFinger project page for all the gritty details.
  
  
• Email. Every account at icculus.org has email. You can receive mail to yourloginname@icculus.org, and yourloginname@any-other-virtual-domains-we-have-in-the-future. All the domains are interchangeable, and will end up in the same mailbox. The mail system is qmail, and can be configured to deliver/forward your mail in several ways. Please read the "dot-qmail" manpage for details. On site, Pine and Mutt are available for reading mail (others may be installed globally by request, but you can feel free to build Elm or whatever in your home directory if you like, too), and, with a little effort, you can get your mail from offsite via an encrypted IMAP4/SSL connection or our webmail system. Please read our email HOWTO for all the gritty details. All email is virus scanned (and blocked if positive) before it reaches your inbox, and you can optionally enable various degrees of spam blocking.
  
  
• Mailing lists. Mailman is installed, and you can use it to maintain your own mailing lists. All projects have a mailing list assigned to them upon request.
  
  
• Jabber. We run our own XMPP ("Jabber") server, so you can use this for IM conversations. At a minimum, you can chat with Google Talk people without having a Google account, but the entire Jabber network is available to you, if you like.
  
  
• Subversion. Icculus.org is primarily meant to be an incubator for open source projects, and to that end, we offer public, anonymous Subversion ("svn") access. We no longer offer CVS accounts, and are in the process of migrating the existing ones to Subversion repositories. There are good svn applications for Windows, MacOS, and Unix, including GUI and shell-integrations in some cases.
  
  Subversion access goes as follows:
      svn co svn://svn.icculus.org/projectname/trunk/ projectname
  
  And each svn repository is browsable from the web, like this one:
      http://svn.icculus.org/physfs/
  
  Unlike CVS, developers can add and remove people's write access to Subversion repositories without icculus.org admin intervention. Only the primary developer needs an Unix shell account in these cases.
  
  
• Git. We also offer git as a less-centralized alternative to Subversion.
  
  Git access goes as follows:
      git://git.icculus.org/username/projectname.git
  
  And git repositories are browsable from the web, from here:
      http://git.icculus.org/
  
  Please be aware that we will not add dozens of shell accounts for each developer that might want a git repository. Each account is considered independently, so plan accordingly.
  
  
• Mercurial. We also offer Mercurial as a less-centralized alternative to Subversion.
  
  A list of all current i.o Mercurial repositories is here.
  
  Public, anonymous, read-only Mercurial access goes as follows:
      http://hg.icculus.org/username/projectname/
  
  You can "clone" through that URL, or point a web browser at it for a human-readable interface.
  
  You can either push to your public Mercurial repository on your shell account at /hgspace/username/projectname, or use ssh:
  
      hg clone ssh://username@hg.icculus.org//hgspace/username/projectname/
      (The two slashes before "hgspace" are required!)
  
  You will probably want to add this to /hgspace/username/projectname/.hg/hgrc ...
  
      [web]
    allowpull = true
    style = gitweb
    contact = my_email_address@wherever.dom
    description = Info about this repository

  
  Please be aware that we will not add dozens of shell accounts for each developer that might want a Mercurial repository. Each account is considered independently, so plan accordingly.
  
  
• Fossil. We also offer Fossil as a less-centralized alternative to Subversion.
  
  Fossil access goes as follows:
      http://fossil.icculus.org/username/projectname/
  
  And Fossil repositories are browsable from the web, from here:
      http://fossil.icculus.org/
  
  Please be aware that we will not add dozens of shell accounts for each developer that might want a fossil repository. Each account is considered independently, so plan accordingly.
  
  
• Webspace. Every user on icculus.org has a personal webspace. It can be accessed by http://icculus.org/~yourusername/ ... to add files to this space, put them in /webspace/homepages/yourusername/ ...Note that "icculus.org" can be replaced with any of our virtual domains in that URL. Every project has webspace, too: http://icculus.org/projectname/ and /webspace/projects/myprojectname/, respectively. The project webspace is linked from the icculus.org front page, once there's something substantial to see there. You are not to run ANY banner ads or popup (or popunder) advertisements on icculus.org webpages. Period. Icculus.org's webserver also has Secure Socket Layer (SSL) support, so if you prefer to view webpages with encryption, connect to https://icculus.org/ instead of http://icculus.org/ ...
  
  
• PHP. For dynamic web content, PHP5 is available for use in your personal and project webspace. We don't offer cgi-bin access without a really good reason, but PHP covers anything you'd practically need to do.
  
  
• Other stuff. Please read our donation page ... We don't charge a dime for use of icculus.org, and we are very firmly against banner ads, so any sort of support you can lend is greatly appreciated. Other than that, if there's a service that you need and don't have, don't hesistate to ask, and we'll see what we can work out.

--The McManagement.